SINGAPORE
Hotels and Hospitality Success
During his four years as CEO and president of hospitality technology provider DOCOMO interTouch, based in Singapore, Charles Reed has helped grow the firm’s revenues from US$20 million to US$155 million per year.
This hotel technology leader, who spends about 180 days each year living in hotel rooms, highlights “a creative and dynamic working environment” as one of the key success factors that have led to various innovations by his firm, which has offices in 65 countries and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT DOCOMO, a leader in mobile telecommunications technologies.
“While a good idea is crucial to kickstart a new project, the team effort in executing it is essentially the key ingredient to our success,” says Reed. “Overall business success stems from a combination of factors: science, processes and analytics but also the entrepreneur’s emotional intelligence, attitude and instincts.”
In-room entertainment technology is the category where his firm has achieved its most outstanding innovations in the past few years. Recently, Reed has been busy commercialising hYspace, a streamlined platform that enables guests to create their preferred environment and room ambience by intelligently controlling the functions and solutions in a hotel room. Another current innovation is a unique SmartPhone solution, which will allow hotel guests to conduct mobile phone-to-PC video chats via voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) technology, enabling them to save costs while travelling.
“Another lesson I’ve learnt is the importance of focusing on the customer—thinking about how they work, what they do, what their objectives are and ultimately, what can help them,” he says. “This is why DOCOMO interTouch continues to focus on innovating its Visitor Based Networks (VBN), solutions that have been built to cater to end-users’ needs. We have led the industry with many firsts in this area, including homepage redirect, plug and play authentication, as well as providing different bandwidths to users on a dynamic basis.”
Making Home ‘muvees’
One vital characteristic of entrepreneurs is their ability to recognise, predict and capitalise on global trends and this is where Singapore-based muvee Technologies has excelled.
According to recent research by network equipment and services provider Cisco, by 2013, nearly two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video, and video communications traffic (video over instant messaging, video calls) will increase 10-fold in the next four years. Cisco predicts that the sum of all forms of video (TV, video-on-demand, Internet video, and P2P) will exceed 90 per cent of global consumer IP traffic.
These trends were foreseen by muvee’s joint founders Terence Swee, now chief executive officer and Dr Pete Kellock, who have been developing the firm’s unique automatic video editing software since 2001.
muvee’s software and services use patented technology so anyone can create and share professional-quality instant home movies out of unedited video, digital pictures and music. The firm now develops consumer products for a range of platforms and devices including PCs, online, digital cameras, camera-equipped mobile phones and photo kiosks.
muvee’s global customers now include many industry giants such as HP, Dell, Nokia, LG, Sony, Olympus, Nikon and Creative Technology.
Swee says muvee has staff working in multiple time zones—Singapore, Melbourne, San Francisco, Tokyo, Seoul and India. Another trend the firm has seized upon is enterprise social networking. They do public relations via ‘mom-bloggers’, including the ‘famous 12 used by Walmart’, Facebook and Twitter.
“We have been experimenting with an enterprise social networking platform and entertaining the notion of having it as our mainstream digital communication platform for the company,” he says. “Instead of having IT staff do daily tape backups of e-mails of all communications and documents, this resource can be better deployed elsewhere in a growing company and seriously, which is statistically more likely to happen: Amazon’s cloud going totally down or CISCO’s tape backup dispatch losing a tape in a road accident on the CTE?”
Master of the Virtual World
Nestled in the leafy suburbs of Singapore, nearly a dozen IT professionals are busy weaving virtual dreams. They are recreating virtual editions of some of the Lion City’s well-known museums.
Set in an office space within the Innovation Centre of the Nanyang Technological University, these real dreamers of virtual reality call themselves the Visual Factory. The Visual Factory specialises in 3D immersive technologies in the domains of virtual museums and virtual exhibitions.
The man behind this startup is CEO Ilan Ofek, who works very closely with Shamim Akhtar, the company’s CTO and Gerald Lui, its business manager.
Formerly the CTO of ST Electronics (Training and Simulation Systems), Ilan Ofek founded Visual Factory back in late 2007. His main idea was to help companies deploy virtual communities in 3D.
Ofek calls himself an entrepreneur focused on the virtual space immersive technologies. He has vast international experience, having started as a guided weapons expert and worked through simulation infrastructures for avionics and game-based simulation. He is an expert in virtual world creation (avatars and computer-generated forces) and studies advanced physics-based modelling, artificial intelligence, data and text mining, and image processing technology. “Visual Factory’s technologies and products aim to redefine 3D community immersive tools and representation of unique smart avatars by setting the standards for 3D assets deployment, interoperability and delivering content that engages people anywhere, at any time,” Ofek says. “The company is positioned as an ‘enabler’ and works with market leaders in the selected domains by bringing them to the next level, being Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 players.”
The company’s principal technology is its own base platform called MagicStitch.
“It is a new and innovative technology that allows fast deployment of virtual communities in complete 3D,” he says. “This is a game-like technology that allows professionals and non-professionals to create, deploy and monetise virtual worlds.”
The Apple of Steve’s Eyes
Having the belief to do things differently is one of the many traits that make a successful entrepreneur. And Jimmy Fong, CEO of Singapore-based Afor, the company behind Apple reseller EpiCentre, certainly had plenty of courage when he began his vision of a digital lifestyle using Apple products.
His first step was to open a fully dedicated one-stop Apple concept store in Orchard Road, a premium retail fashion shopping location, right in the midst of an economic downturn. “There were a lot of naysayers saying ‘We should have opened the store in places more known for selling technology gadgets’ or ‘Apple is expensive, not user-friendly and has no after-sales support’,” recalls Fong.
Undaunted, he set up EpiCentre to fully support his overall vision of a digital lifestyle of Apple products. The store’s open layout encourages customers to touch, feel and test the range of Apple products offered. EpiCentre also provides training and hands-on coaching for these devices. Sensing a lack of after-sales support for Apple product, Fong set up iConcierge—where support and guidance for Mac users can be obtained—and trade-in services, where Apple products can be brought in for a valuation and trade-in for a new one, in addition to the service centre at the EpiCentre.
Today, there are four EpiCentre stores with three in Singapore and one in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Three more outlets are scheduled to open in Singapore.
MALAYSIA
Mission Impossible
For 40 years, scientists believed that ‘efficient LEDs [light emitting diodes] for operations larger than one giga-hertz (GHz), were not feasible’. Malaysia-born Dr Gabriel Walter and his team shattered this myth last year when they demonstrated that LEDs can operate at seven GHz.
“In an age where energy conservation and the issues of global warming are important, this represented a significant environmental technology breakthrough,” says Dr Walter, founder of Malaysia-based Quantum Electro Opto Systems (QEOS). “Our high-speed LEDs will enable a new class of cost-competitive ‘green’ products that are environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing.”
His work has resulted in more than 45 peer-reviewed journal papers and two patents (eight pending). “At least four important patents have been jointly filed by the QEOS-UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign] team to protect these discoveries,” says Dr Walter. “Since 2003, a cluster of more than 18 patents were filed by UIUC and QEOS-UIUC.”
“It was almost a year before the founders accepted the challenge to commercialise the technology from within Malaysia,” he says. “Personally, I had to make sure that the government would be as committed as I would be to the programme. We have been very fortunate to work with dedicated people from MOSTI [ministry of science, technology and innovation], and other government agencies.”
“At least 30 per cent of the components used to manufacture the products resulting from this new achievement will be from Malaysia-based companies as we want to help generate business activities to local suppliers,” says Dr Walter.
Last year, Dr Walter, along with others, founded QEOS to commercialise transistor laser-based applications. He holds the position of chief operating officer of the company and since 2003, has also been a senior research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with research interests that include III-V light emitters and detectors.
Academy sets the Standard
In the field of setting standards for the IT industry, the managing director of EC-Council Asia Pacific, Wilson Wong, was instrumental in establishing the certification authority in Malaysia as an internationally recognised centre for professional and academic education and training. It is designed to enable individual success and advancement through certification. Under his leadership, the EC-Council Academy has grown from its inception in 2004 to a full-fledged IT security training centre with state-of-the-art facilities.
Over the years, the academy has trained more than 3,000 participants and has also conducted regular seminars and talk sessions on IT security. It is a professional organisation and leading provider of e-business certification and Internet security programmes. Wong manages and markets the academy’s programmes throughout the region in countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Brunei, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Philippines.
The founder of the EC-Council Academy is also a pioneer of the first-ever Hacker Halted event in Kuala Lumpur in 2004. Wong organised the vendor-neutral platform with an objective to provide C-level management, senior IT professionals and technical infosecurity professionals with the best practices in acquiring, implementing, managing and measuring the information security postures of their organisations.
He went on to organise the same event in Malaysia in 2007 and 2008, and the Hacker Halted Asia Pacific 2009.
A Milestone Project
Another entrepreneur, who has a milestone SAP project under his belt, is Rahim Osman, CEO of Vantage Consulting. The project was later used as a global client reference by SAP Worldwide. It also made Vantage the first company in Southeast Asia to set up a centre of excellence in SAP Germany.
The milestone was a public sector collection and disbursements project at the Administrative Centre of Malaysia. Vantage had the distinction of being the first SAP partner in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to do set up such a centre.
Vantage has also clinched a Telekom Malaysia project, which was the largest SAP implementation ever to be signed by a SAP partner in Malaysia.
Osman says the company has delivered transformation projects successfully for several public-sector, government-linked companies and private entities locally and overseas. “It wasn’t an easy feat as we have to compete with many multinational players which are larger, more established and have a presence all over the world. We recommend that the organisations leverage technology to meet their goals.
Osman says: “Above all, the company has been recognised as the top partner in Malaysia by SAP. The pinnacle award was accorded to the company as a result of 12 years of dedicated and sheer efforts, strong belief in the solution and focus on the identified industries. Despite strong competition from much more established players such as IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG and some other multinationals, the company managed to distinguish itself by clinching and implementing successfully several large projects for SAP.”
The co-founder of Vantage has led the company on a path that has increased market penetration, diversified products and services, and established strategic alliances with SAP and other regional businesses in Europe and the Middle East as well as Bursa Malaysia Securities Exchange main board-listed IT solutions company HeiTech Padu.
Young Upstart Thinks Big
The young upstart among our top 20 trendsetters is software programmer Jason Khong. He’s only 27 years old and was pleasantly surprised to be ‘the first Malaysian in AppStore’, which is the download site of more than 50,000 applications for the iPhone.
Other applications include FundPrice.my (personalised unit trust pricing) and Christmas Mistletoe (with special focus on the graphics and accelerometer capabilities of the iPhone).
“The social Web is changing the conversation,” he says. “For instance, with Fundprice.my, we’ve seen change in the flow of unit trust information from the traditional top-down communication to a multi-way conversation.”
This young entrepreneur, who started programming at the tender age of 13 and set up his first company at 17, adds: “Both the traditional media and blogs now have access to the same tools for publishing personalised unit trust pricing. Instead of rating agencies directing the ranks of funds, everyone can have their say by voting for funds of their choice.
“Basically, we’re seeing the social Web come into play even in traditional fields, and we’re really excited about that,” he says. “Malaysians seem to share our enthusiasm.”
Fundprice.my, as a standalone project, saw growth from zero to more than 100,000 visits a day within six weeks of launch, Khong adds with much pride.
Khong has always had a passion for the IT startup scene. This Malaysian entrepreneur is now seeing encouraging momentum behind his latest efforts in the personal finance and mobile application industry. Besides being a software geek, he is also involved in helping others build their businesses through Kingdom Ventures.
He encourages more developers to look into iPhone or Web development and bring their own wild ideas to reality. “Part of my contribution to Kingdom Ventures is to help these new businesses get started with the right foundation. In the medium term, we’ll be looking at bringing all these projects to the region and expanding the content and coverage through strategic partnerships with local companies.”
HONG KONG
Bank Technologist
With more than 25 years at HSBC Hong Kong, Raymond Cheng, chief technology and services officer, has pioneered new technologies to support the bank’s businesses and operations such as process centralisation, operations off-shoring, intelligent front-end systems and Internet services.
Prior to his current role, Cheng led the distributed software development organisation of HSBC.com in New Jersey, US, and Vancouver, Canada, to build the new generation of Internet services for group entities in different countries. In his current role, Cheng delivers technology and operational services to the bank’s businesses in Hong Kong and helps drive an intelligent cost management discipline. This aligns customer experience with the goals of the One HSBC programme by leveraging the global capability across IT and operations.
Under his leadership, with the HSBC One programme, a common technology platform is established across all business units in all countries where the bank has a presence. “Through this programme, which is the major IT investment in innovation that we put in, we standardise the way that we operate our business globally. We will act as one bank through this major programme, to implement one single set of systems to support that,” Cheng said during a presentation at a recent information systems symposium.
The HSBC spends about 15 per cent of its operating cost on technology, says Cheng, because IT is considered “a very key part of our [bank’s] investment.” Of this IT budget, 35 per cent is spent on keeping the lights on, to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, as well as ‘evergreen’ business. The remaining 65 per cent of the IT budget, says Cheng, is used for supporting new projects, and new business practices.
High-tech Stocks Trading
Also in the finance sector, as the IT brains behind the fast-paced stock trading houses of Hong Kong, Alfred Wong leads the development of mission-critical systems at the city’s financial bourse.
Wong is the chief technology officer and head of the IT division of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), the holding company of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK), Hong Kong Futures Exchange and Hong Kong Securities Clearing Company. HKEx takes the role of the operator and frontline regulator of the central securities and derivatives marketplace in Hong Kong.
Always in the frontline, Wong had a key role in the implementation of the auto-matching system, a trading system in the trading hall of the four exchanges that formed the SEHK.
The auto-matching system (AMS/1) is a computer-assisted system launched in 1993 in the trading hall via the trading terminal to enable trade negotiations over the telephone. Three years later, the second-generation (AMS/2) came into place to extend the trading screens to all broker offices across the city. In 2000, AMS/3 was launched with a system-to-system interface and to provide traders with diversified accessibility.
“Our journey wouldn’t stop there [with AMS/3], despite that fact that the auto-matching system is very function-rich,” says Wong. “Since we launched the AMS/3 in 2000, we have improved the capacity of the HKEx by more than 15 times.
“Our system is very competitive and mission-critical, we have to keep abreast of the technology advancement and our IT professionals need to be innovative and keep in pace with what the business needs,” he says.
World-class Health Systems
In the sphere of healthcare IT, one CIO has received much praise and recognition from research firm Gartner. He is Andre Greyling, CIO of the Hospital Authority (HA) Hong Kong, a statutory body that manages all public healthcare institutions in the harbour city.
“These two individuals [Greyling and Dr N.T. Cheung, the head of health informatics at the HA] have created both information systems and relationships with internal and external stakeholders that are world class,” says Vi Shaffer, a Gartner research director who specialises in the healthcare industry.
“Expanding the role of IT in managing health for a city’s population within the hospitals and across the boundaries of physicians, health systems and public health is extremely important,” Shaffer adds.
Greyling, together with Cheung, has been driving a monumental project that aims to extend the sharing of patients’ records from public hospitals to private healthcare providers. They have been leading the HA’s Public-Private Interface Electronic Patient Record (PPI-ePR) initiative.
PPI-ePR is expected to enhance the information flow between the public healthcare sector with the private healthcare providers by integrating silo healthcare systems with the HA’s existing clinical information systems, which were first developed in 1991. With the patients’ consent, a medical practitioner who holds a valid PPI-ePR account will be able to view up-to-date patient information, including diagnosis, discharge summaries, procedures, laboratory reports, medications, radiological records, allergies, and the recent treatment schedule.
Patients are expected to benefit from more choices of healthcare providers, and better continuity of care between different service providers when PPI-ePR reaches maturity. At the end of April 2008, more than 900 private healthcare professionals and 26,000 patients had enrolled in the programme.
CHINA
A Business-to-Business Giant
The world’s largest B2B e-commerce company, Alibaba.com, has announced that it has surpassed one million members in India and that 40,000 Indian small to medium enterprises (SMEs) are now signing up every month.
“India is a unique and very important market for us because it has a large SME population and both a robust domestic market and a growing export sector,” says David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com. We grew by 138 per cent in India last year and it is now our largest supplier market after China.”
Despite the global economic downturn, more than a million new members joined Alibaba’s international marketplace during each of the third and fourth quarters of 2008, representing the biggest quarterly increases since the firm was founded.
The firm achieved total revenue of RMB3 billion (US$439 million) in 2008, an increase of 39 per cent on 2007. At the end of March 2009, Alibaba revenue had increased 19 per cent year-on-year. “We are pleased with the results we achieved in 2008, even though it was a trying year for many firms and across many industries,” Wei says. “Our results in 2008, especially in the fourth quarter, demonstrate that an increasing number of SMEs are turning to e-commerce as a way to seek new customers and expand into new markets.”
Jack Ma, a former English teacher from the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, formed Alibaba.com with 17 other founders in 1999 as a trading platform for small and medium manufacturers to sell their wares. He is known by some as ‘China’s Internet Godfather’ and counts ‘flexibility’ as a key entrepreneurial asset.
Founded in China in 1999, and counting Yahoo as a significant shareholder, Alibaba.com connects small businesses with potential customers and trusted suppliers globally for just about every conceivable product, from laptops to wedding dresses to auto engine parts.
Alibaba.com has more than 8.6 million registered users on its international marketplace from 240 countries and regions, and its membership base grew by 80 per cent in 2008. Headquartered in Hangzhou, Alibaba.com has offices in more than 40 cities across Greater China as well as in Europe and the United States.
Sharing Cyber Intelligence
Another attribute of trendsetters and entrepreneurs is the willingness to openly share knowledge for the overall benefit of their industry.
Beijing-based company KnownSec has recently allowed access, by security companies and national computer emergency response teams, to a massive database of malware found on Chinese websites.
KnownSec CEO Zhao Wei says the database covers more Chinese websites and provides more up-to-date information about their security than any other. China produces most of the world’s malware, he says.
China also hosted the second-highest number of phishing sites in the world in the last quarter, mainly targeting Chinese bank users.
KnownSec gathered the viruses and other information with a crawler that scans nearly two million Chinese websites each day. “We cannot realise the role of this data by just keeping it,” Zhao says. A history for each site in the database lists dates of malware infection, the strings of malicious code placed on the sites and which anti-virus products defend viewers against their attacks. The database also stores tens of thousands of viruses found being distributed by the sites.
KnownSec each day finds more than 100 Trojan downloader files that have never been seen before, Zhao says. Each of those can direct a victim’s PC to download up to 10 viruses.
The database also has a list of websites that are currently compromised. Only about half of the newly infected sites KnownSec finds each day are also listed by Google as dangerous, says Zhao.
Security companies and national computer emergency response teams can request access to the KnownSec database, Zhao says. Security companies could use the information to shield users of their anti-virus programs against new malware threats, he says.
INDIA
Pioneer of Change
He was listed among the 50 ‘Pioneers of Change’ by India Today in 2008. And as one of the inventors of the Simputer, he received India’s highest award for innovation in IT, the Dewang Mehta Award, the first time it was awarded in 2001. The Simputer is a self-contained, open hardware handheld computer, designed for use in environments where computing devices such as PCs are deemed inappropriate.
Professor Vijay Chandru is the founder of Strand Life Sciences, a computational biology company considered a pioneer in discovery research informatics, and currently serves as its chairman and chief executive officer. Strand specialises in applying decision sciences and systems modeling to discovery research in life sciences. It is venture-funded by Sequoia Capital and UVF, is a profitable company with a highly skilled and inter-disciplinary workforce of more than 120, with offices in Bangalore and California.
For work with Strand and biotechnology, he was named a technology pioneer of the World Economic Forum in 2007, and the Biospectrum Biotech Entrepreneur of 2007.
Professor Chandru is also a founder of PicoPeta Simputers, a private limited company that commercialised the high profile Simputer technology and brought it to market as the Amida Simputer. PicoPeta was listed among the seven hottest startups worldwide by Technology Review in 2002.
For contributions to science and society, Professor Chandru was awarded the Hari Om Trust Award by University Grants Commission (MHRD) in 2003, the President’s Medal of INFORMS in 2006, and Distinguished Alumni award by the MIT India Program in 2007.
Therapy Design
Still in the area and science and research, Taher Abbasi is the driving force behind the Cellworks Group which designs new therapeutics for specific complex diseases. The Cellworks design approach is disease physiology-centric and is based on a breakthrough virtual functional proteomics-based ‘therapy design’ proprietary technology.
Taher, now CEO, co-founded the California Incorporated company in 2005, with its R&D facility (Cellworks Research India) based in Bangalore, India.
This venture-funded company’s assets are focused in the areas of oncology, auto-immune disorders, Type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s and cosmetic applications related to pigmentation/ageing.
“The concept and idea for Cellworks was driven by the fact that less than 10 per cent of drug discovery projects initiated end up getting approved,” he says.
“Also because of inherent limitations of conducting experiments in cell lines and animals; there is very limited understanding and transparency of the disease physiology and drug interaction.
“With the mainstream adoption of genomics and proteomics there was an opportunity to aggregate all the different information together into a virtual functional dynamic view of the cellular physiology aligned to human physiology.”
In Taher’s words, this was analogous to what such an approach did for the semiconductor industry; such an approach would fuel the methodology of designing therapeutics versus random high-throughput screening.
Offshoring Success
Any article on trendsetters and entrepreneurs in IT would not be complete without including one of the leaders of India’s tech outsourcing giants. Laxman Badiga, CIO of Wipro Technologies, was one of the key managers responsible for ensuring the success of the tech firm’s offshore services from India, according to the company. He was the project manager of the team which made the first offshore-based product development succeed in the 1980s and also introduced the concept of packaged software in India.
In the 1990s, Badiga shifted to services and his mandate was to make Wipro a leading services provider. His accomplishments at Wipro include launching of the retail and utilities verticals and establishing two of the firm’s top 10 accounts. He recruited and integrated almost 20,000 Wipro employees while leading the Talent Transformation group and was also responsible for development of InstaPlan, a top-tier project planning and control package launched in the US in 1987.
With 27 years of IT experience under his belt, he was appointed corporate vice president and CIO of Wipro in 2005. Currently, Badiga is responsible for driving key initiatives at Wipro, such as green IT and using IT to effectively provide remote working and collaboration, via the ‘Wipro Extended Work Environment’. “This has led to improved resource utilisation, enabled virtual training, reduced travel spend, and increased efficiency in the recruitment process,” said Wipro.
For his outstanding achievements, Badiga was featured in the first-ever Global CIO 50 List by InformationWeek in June this year. The magazine noted: “He handled global resourcing for all of Wipro’s service businesses, and during his tenure there has been a 50 per cent annual growth in resources. Wipro this year surpassed US$5 billion in annual revenue, with sales up 29 per cent. The challenge ahead is to keep finding new growth areas while bolstering profit, which rose only seven per cent the past year.”
PHILIPPINES
Sunny Side Up
With CEO James Go at the driving seat, Philippines-based mobile operator Sun Cellular’s considerable growth was recognised at the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards as the Most Promising Service Provider of the Year.
According to the judging panel, Sun Cellular was chosen due to its considerable momentum in 2008. The company’s ever expanding mobile coverage and recent 3G network launch are seen as making it a formidable competitor.
“Sun Cellular was able to grow its subscriber base at an impressive rate of 83 per cent year-on-year and gained four market share points while competing against two very established competitors,” says Marc Einstein, industry manager, Asia Pacific, ICT practice, Frost & Sullivan.
“They also unveiled several innovative plans geared towards the under-developed postpaid market and now rank a close second in the segment, a considerable achievement given that they only have a 12 per cent market share overall,” he adds.
In May, Go told Philippines reporters that the growth of its service revenues were expected to double. “We are expecting that our service revenues in Sun Cellular will incur a 100 per cent growth year-on-year, exceeding our 2008 growth of 82 per cent,” he said. Go added that Sun Cellular was looking to build 1,000 more cellular base stations for their 2G business and an extra 300-500 sites for the 3G service.
Sun Cellular pioneered the intra-network unlimited wireless services in the Philippines through its 24/7 Call and Text Unlimited and 24/7 Text Unlimited services. It continues to significantly increase its network coverage by investing almost US$300 million every year for additional network infrastructure. This aggressive expansion has enabled the telco to reach 119 of the country’s key cities and provinces.
The Digital King
Another outstanding entrepreneur, also from a Philippine telco, is Enrique Gonzalez, CEO of IPVG Corp. Dubbed the ‘digital king’ by the country’s media, he has diversified the company to operate in industries including telecommunications, online gaming content and business process outsourcing (BPO).
Gonzalez recently concluded a strategic partnership with telecommunications giant PCCW for the Philippine market for BPO operations, and acquired Influent, one of the top 15 telemarketing or call centre companies in the US. He also bought over Prolexic, a distributed denial of service mitigation services provider. Sensing growth opportunities in the market, he entered the mobile content development industry with the acquisition of MegaMobile and launched a new subsidiary to focus on payment delivery and e-commerce solutions, iPay Commerce Ventures.
Speaking to Philippines-based Daily Inquirer earlier this year, he said IPVG is on track to produce a second consecutive year of profitable growth. “If you look at the industries that we are involved in, the sectors of online gaming, BPO and data centres are resilient to the economic downturn.” He added that despite the current recession, the IT industry in the Philippines is in a good position as multinationals, looking to drive costs down and diversifying their geopolitical risks, are going to engage the vendors there.
He was also recognised as the ‘IT Executive of the Year’ at the Cyberpress IT Choice Awards, organised by the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines, held in December 2008.
INDONESIA
Ambitious Goals
One key measure of an entrepreneur is the ambition of his goals and the newly-appointed president-director of the Indonesia Stock Exchange, Ito Warsito, certainly has set some high targets. Warsito was formerly the president commissioner of Jakarta brokerage firm Bahana Securities. He was elected to the IDX post in June 2009 and stated some clear goals for his new role.
According to the Jakarta Post, Warsito, who took his new office from 1 July, has vowed to more than double the number of IDX retail investors each year of his three-year term, setting a target of 2.3 million by 2012, from the current 329,000, less than one per cent of the Indonesian population. By comparison, some 30 per cent of Singaporeans currently invest in the Lion City’s stock market.
The new IDX team reportedly plans to increase the number of listed firms to 450 from about 400 and to double market capitalisation to Rp3,000 trillion (US$291 billion).
“We are aware that the future of our bourse means reaching out to people in remote areas,” Warsito told a media conference after his election. “We are aware that the state of our industry will depend on the confidence of the investors.
“We will try to manage negative rumors in the market and put them in the right context so as not to disrupt trading activity,” the Post quoted Warsito as saying. The newspaper reported that, to help achieve these targets, the new IDX IT director, Adikin Basirun, proposed to allocate Rp100 billion (US$10 million) for upgrading the online trading system, to reach more investors across Indonesia.
The new IDX executive team is likely to confront major challenges in the wake of the October 2008 market crash, when large numbers of Indonesia investors retreated from the market.
THAILAND
Farmers, Teenagers and Bank Users
From providing SMS updates on agricultural products to offering post-paid talk plans targeted at teenage girls, Thai-based telco dtac is one of the few providers in the region focusing on understanding the needs of its customers. Dtac has also distinguished itself as a technology innovator in Thailand. It was one of the first operators to roll out corporate mobile e-mail services.
Among dtac’s forward-thinking management is their chief commercial officer, Thana Thienachariya. With him as the driving force behind the launch of the telco’s mobile banking tool ATM SIM, dtac has successfully implemented an innovative technology platform that is practical for customers.
A collaboration between Thai bank Kasikornbank and dtac, ATM SIM enables customers of both organisations to make financial transactions via dtac’s network. Users can check their bank balances, transfer money, receive notifications, pay the bills of public utilities, credit card spending, products, services, monthly phone fees, and insurance premiums and refill their call credits via their mobile phones anywhere as if they were doing these through ATMs.
According to dtac, ATM SIM posts as many as three million mobile banking transactions per month, a growth of as much as 900 per cent compared with the transactions recorded upon its launch last year.
ATM SIM does not need to be connected to the Internet or GPRS, thus providing a large addressable market, says Jayesh Easwaramony, director, ICT Consulting and head of Telecoms Research, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific. But what attracted the judges most was ATM SIM’s strong security feature, adds Easwaramony. “The most impressive part was the three-factor authentication data encryption standard since security is of paramount importance in banking.”
ATM SIM has since won a series of accolades including the Best Mobile Money Service award from the GSM Association in the GSMA’s Mobile Congress in 2008. It also won the Excellence in Mobile Phone Banking award at the Retail Financial Services Convention 2009.The latest recognition has come at the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards where ATM SIM was chosen as the Most Innovative Application of the Year.
